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Science Re-Cap of Week – 01/23/16

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Its been a wild week over on the MostlyScience facebook page. But if you missed some of our posts, fear not! We have your re-cap right here.

1) Why you should probably not eat snow. A recent study published in the journal Environmental Research shows that snow attracts pollutants from the air in levels that surpassed the detection limit. One conclusion to draw to draw from the study is that living in a snowy environment was potentially good for your health, as the snow drew the pollutants from the air you breathe.

2) The ultra-violent origins of gold: It seems supernovas aren’t enough. Nature has an even more extreme way of making heavy elements. And we may be on the point of observing the distortions of space-time caused in the process

4) EPFL scientists have developed a new method that helps cells turn into usable stem cells. The approach involves “squeezing” cells with a gel, and paves the way for large-scale production of stem cells for medical purposes.

6) A really nice wee run down of the differences you can find between science and pseudoscience. “Knowing science does not mean simply knowing scientific facts. It means understanding the nature of science—the criteria of evidence, the design of meaningful experiments, the weighing of possibilities, the testing of hypotheses, the establishment of theories, the many aspects of scientific methods that make it possible to draw reliable conclusions about the physical universe.”

7) Scientists have created a chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak. The researchers altered the molecular processes that leads to beak development in chickens (which are a distant relative of the dinosaurs). This amazing work has been published in the journal Evolution by scientists from Yale and Harvard.

9) Possible 9th planet identified.”This would be a real ninth planet. There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting.”—Mike Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy